Tarantino’s Homage to 1960s Hollywood is Bold, Beguiling, and a Bit Problematic: Film Review
[Warning: The following contains spoilers of a film currently in wide release. Read at your own risk.]
A very brief history of Quentin Tarantino and Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood
The wildly eccentric and visionary filmmaker Quentin Tarantino was born in 1963 in Knoxville, Tennessee. Movies and television dominated his formative years. He was named after Burt Reynolds’s character from the CBS Western Gunsmoke. His father worked as an actor and producer. Following their divorce, his mother moved him to Torrance, CA (just south of Los Angeles) and indulged his love of movies by taking him to countless screenings. He dropped out of high school and held a number of jobs throughout his teens and early twenties, including usher at a porn theater and manager of a Manhattan video store. By the late 1980s, he had gotten his start in Hollywood, writing and directing short films and small acting roles like his turn as an Elvis impersonator on a 1988 episode of NBC’s classic sitcom The Golden Girls.
In 1992, he got his big break with the opportunity to write and direct Reservoir Dogs, a micro-budgeted heist film that he co-starred in alongside the likes of Tim Roth, Steve Buscemi, and Michael Madsen. The warm response to that film paved the way for…
